A Last Talk with Leslie Mcfarlane

A Last Talk with Leslie McFarlane DA VID PALMER L eslie McFarlane, one of the world's most popular children's authors and a prolific contributor to Canadian popular culture, died on September 6th, 1977, in Whitby, Ontario. Born at Carleton Place, Ontario, in 1902, he worked as a reporter for several newspapers in Ontario and Massachusetts, and from the twenties to the forties contributed hundreds of stories and serials to the "better pulps" and "sn~ooth-paper magazines" (as Maclean's explained in 1940) in Canada, the U.S.A. and Great Britain. In this period he also published two novels, and under various pseudonyms wrote numerous children's adventure books for the Stratemeyer Syndicate of New Jersey (home of the Bobbsey Twins), including the first Hardy Boys books. In the late thirties and forties he wrote dozens of radio plays, and in 1944, after two years with the Department of Munitions and Supply, he was invited by John Grierson to join the National Film Board. During the next fourteen years he wrote, produced or directed (often all three) twenty- eight documentary fbs, winning several awards and an Oscar nomination. In 1958 he became head of the television drama script department at the CBC and wrote many television plays for that and other networks. He continued to produce occasional books (and revisions of earlier works) for children, and some of these later writings are reviewed elsewhere in this issue of CCL. Ironically, in view of this enormous output, McFarlane is probably best known now as the original Franklin W. Dixon. He eventually produced twenty-one Hardy Boys titles, a task wluch he accepted as necessary hack- work to support more ambitious literary activities, and from wlucll he derived no royalities. A recent estimate puts annual sales of this series at nearly two million copies. Leslie McFarlane has provided a witty and irrever- ent account of the experience in his autobiographical Ghost of the Hardy Boys (1976). Over the last twenty years the books have undergone a contro- versial revision and modernization by other hands. The interview which follows took place in a motel room in Hamilton, Ontario, on April 23rd, 1977, the day after McFarlane had received an award at the "Canada Day" festival of Canadian literature held at Mohawlc College in Hamilton. The short robust figure of previous years was much thinner, but Leslie McFarlaneYsconversation was still lively and vigorous. The trans- cript of the interview was intended to be sent to McFarlane for clarification and amplification of certain points, but death intervened. To preserve authenticity, editing has been kept to the minimum required for reasonable clarity and economy. PALMER: I want to start with the comlnent you made yesterday about the disapproval of the Hardy Boys boolcs by librarians. I wonder if you could expand on your reaction to that. McFARLANE: Well, I had an irresistible impulse yesterday afternoon, when I mentioned the fact that the Hardy Boys stories had been banned in the Stratford-Waterloo area, to say, ''This now classes them with Perzt/zouse magazine." Yes, this business of banning boolcs is nonsensical. Of course, my only interest in the matter is entirely academic, because I get no royalties from the boolcs, and the books are re-written books from my originals and so on. But the banning or withdrawing of books from circulation in libraries is a really potent weapon because you're getting into censorslup there. Certainly, I do believe in a certain degree of censorship for magazines of the nature of Penthotlse, because many of them are gross, and put out purely to make money catering to depraved tastes. So I am not entirely against censorsl~ip; I think a certain amount of control is desirable here and there. But so far as the Hardy Boys boolcs are concerned, they'll take care of themselves. If they are banned, kids will go out and buy them anyway. They're pretty powerful n~arltet-wiseyou know. Kids will buy what they want. I would probably rather see them get the books from the library free. Mind you, it costs the library a good deal of money to maintain a set of Hardy Boys books because there are about 50 or 60 of them and kids wear them out. They're not in very durable bindings, and I recall when we lived in the Town of Moullt Royal quite a number of years ago, they used to use several sets of Hardy Boys books every year and thought notlung of it. But really, are the boolcs written for a librarian, a teacher, or are they written for children? To the writer it's an important question. Now some librarians are extremely good, and others are-oh boy, they make the writer of children's books shudder when he confronts them. They're very prissy, very straight, very solemn. They think a book should educate. There's no reason a book should educate. If it amuses children, makes them laugh, takes them out of themselves, that's often sufficient. The job of librarians is to select the sort of things that children are going to read, which gives them an enormous influence you know. I think it's more important for the librarian, say, of the clddren's section of a public library to pass a pretty rigid examin- ation than it is for a school teacher, since school teachers are probably limited to one age group. But the librarian goes on and on dealing with kids of all ages over a long period of time. PALMER: There's a great contrast between the Hardy Boys books and your more recent books about children, such as The Last of the Great Picnics or A Kid in Haileybury. Is that the result of the constraints involved in working for the Stratemeyer Syndicate? McFARLANE: Well yes. You wrote what was wanted, you know, you wrote to a market. But I simply assumed, well, he knows his business, and I think he did, and certainly his business was to sell a great many books, or a large number of copies of any book. So he knew his business that way. But the outlines were rather, you know, set pattern things. The same story over and over again, which leads me into one com-ment on writkg for children. h telling stories to small children (my own youngsters included, when they were growing up) I discovered they wanted the same story all the time. I imagine librarians are familiar with this manifestation. You tell them the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, and the next evening: "I'll tell you another story. I'll tell you the story of Cinderella." "No, I want Jack and the Bean- stalk." So you tell them the one about Jack and the Beanstalk, and he gets up to the palace and the giant says "fe-fi-fo-fum, I want the blood of an Er~&shman," and you make an error in that and miss the c'fe-fi-fo-fum," a look of dismay crosses the youngster: "How about the fe-fi-fo-fum? " They remember every detail, and they want it exactly, they want the facsimile of the story you've told. This is really rather an odd thing about youngsters, and of course I think it follows through, say, in a series of books-once you've written a book that is successful they want the same story all over again. PALMER: It must be a little odd for you to be known mainly as the person who ghost-wrote the Hardy Boys stories, when you've had such a long and distinguished career in other kinds of writing and activities. McFARLANE: Right from the begining I tried to avoid any association of my name with the Hardy Boys, but in spite of everything it seems to have pursued me ever since people discovered that I did write the books. And I think too there was something I didn't particularly care for, and that was: here's a Canadian who has made good in a difficult field. Because I was a Canadian, newspapers would take this thing up. Well, whether I was a Canadian wasn't the point. But there is such a chauvinistic attitude on the part of various areas of the press towards anything Canadian. Well, look at the current story about Groucho Marx's troubles: his nurse is a Canadian. This is being played up, as if this reflected some additional glory on this country. Here's a Canadian whose books have sold fifty million copies. Well, so what? It's a big sale, fifty to sixty titles in several languages. But I can't say that I was particularly proud of this association. I wrote the boolcs as part of making a living, and they were only a very small, fractional bit of what I have written over a period of sixty years. I don't regard myself as a writer for children in any way. It happens that in writing all the kinds of things I have written, some books fall into that category. Gage and Com- any would send me a note and say: we would like, say, a story for one of our school readers, and we would like it to be a hockey story, and could we have, please, a girl heroine? Well, this is rather a nice slant, and you figure, well why not? So I sit down and contrive a story with a girl as a heroine of a hockey story.

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